What Joswell Ledger is about

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Joswell is a family run retail and wholesale store in Nigeria that sells mostly drinks, by the crate and by the bottle. For months, every sale, restock and credit lived in a Google Sheet.

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Then one day the numbers stopped adding up.

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The Daily Sales total used =SUM(G2:G101). Once sales went past row 101, every new one was left out of the total. No error. No warning. The sheet showed ₦242,715 when the real figure was ₦352,315. That was the moment the spreadsheet stopped being something we could trust.

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Joswell Ledger is the web app that replaced it: every total is calculated, never typed.

Understanding how the store actually runs

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Before designing anything, I went through the sheet and the way the store works day to day.

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What I found:

• Totals were worked out by hand, so one wrong range or missed cell changed the whole day.
• Sales, restocks, credit and stock lived in separate places and never updated each other.
• Small entry gaps crept in, like a sale saved without its unit price.
• There was no way to trace where a dashboard total came from.
• Crates and bottles sell at different margins, so a bottle price can't just be the crate price divided by 24.

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The store didn't need a smarter spreadsheet. It needed a ledger where the numbers check themselves, and where nothing becomes permanent until the right person says so.

Decisions that kept the numbers honest

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I designed every screen in Figma, then built it with AI doing most of the coding. ChatGPT handled most of the first implementation, and I now use Claude Code for cleanup and new features. I owned the product direction, the PRD, the roadmap, the branding and the production setup.

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Calculated, never typed:
Totals, balances and stock are always worked out by the app. Nobody can type a number that disagrees with the records behind it.

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Crate and bottle prices stay separate:
Each product has its own crate price and bottle price, because they carry different margins. The app never guesses one from the other.

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Three roles, one approval flow:
The Admin runs setup and analytics. The Store Manager runs the daily ledger. Store Staff create drafts and submit them. Drafts only become permanent once the Manager or Admin approves them, and a rejection comes with a reason so the entry can be fixed and resubmitted. The roles are enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface.

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One entry, no double work:
A credit sale creates both the sale and the customer's credit record in one step.

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Reliability before features:
Database migrations run by hand, so a routine deploy can never quietly change the data. Offline mode, multiple branches and an AI copilot all wait until the basics have months of real data behind them.

From a sheet nobody trusted to one source of truth

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Joswell Ledger went live in the store in late September 2026. From cutover, it became the system of record and the Google Sheet was retired for new entries.

• The whole team works in it, each with their own permissions: Admin, Store Manager and Store Staff.
• On one recorded day, the store logged 26 sales entries through the app.
• Moving the API closer to the database cut response times from about 1,350ms to between 26 and 80ms, a difference you can feel in use.

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What broke, and what I learned

A billing issue on the hosting side once blocked logins. I fixed it and added usage alerts so it can't sneak up again. The API also started out in San Francisco while the database sat in Frankfurt, which is where that slow response time came from.

The lesson: when real money runs through an app, boring reliability work matters more than the next feature.

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What's next

• General products beyond crates and bottles, requested by the store manager. Think a tin and a carton of milk, or a pack and a carton of noodles, all tracked in one base unit underneath.
• Nightly backups with a tested restore.
• Low stock thresholds set per product.

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The goal was never to build software for its own sake. It was to make sure every sale the store makes actually gets counted.